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Monday, 1 June 2015

NICE has given the green light to a new QOF indicator rewarding practices for how many patients they treat with statins at the 10% primary prevention threshold, despite unease among GP members on the independent advisory panel.

The introduction of the 10% threshold for prescribing statins to patients newly diagnosed diabetes and hypertension was discussed this afternoon at the first meeting of the newly convened QOF committee.

The indicator will now be put forward for GPC and NHS Employers to negotiate its introduction into the contract for 2015/16.

Several GP members of the panel voiced concerns about the proposed indicator rewarding practices only for treatment with statins and not lifestyle advice - which they said goes against the NICE lipid modification guidelines which emphasise lifestyle advice should be offered before statin therapy.

They argued for the indicator to be reworded to reward offering lifestyle advice and other interventions as appropriate, including statins, to allow GPs room to discuss the option of statins with patients. They also proposed the term ‘offer’ a statin be used rather than ‘treated with’ a statin to allow more room for GPs to give patients the option of a statin rather than be paid only if the patient ended up with a prescription.

However, other committee members, including one GP, argued that NICE guidelines were clear that GPs should be prescribing statins at the 10% threshold, and that GPs would be able to exception report patients who chose not to take the drug option.

The panel agreed instead to introduce a new indicator incentivising lifestyle advice in these groups, as well as a new indicator incentivising statin treatment at the 10% threshold - and to introduce new business codes to allow for the exception reporting.

NICE QOF Committee chair Professor Danny Keenan said patients in these risk groups at the 10% risk threshold ‘should be on a statin’.

He added: ‘We have very clear guidelines, they couldn’t be clearer - and we’ve been over and over this. We’ve introduced the lifestyle indicator and allowed for exception reporting and we should go ahead with this.’

Dr Andrew Green, chair of the GPC prescribing committee, said it was ‘obviously disappointing that NICE have chosen to ignore the views of both the body that represents GPs as well as our royal college’.

However, he added, ‘whether this eventually becomes part of QOF remains subject to negotiation’.

Dr Green said: ‘I have no doubt the proposed indicator 11a [the proposal to measure the prescription of statins] will be a measure of prescribing activity but not of the quality of patient care, which depends on many more factors than a simple tablet-count. As general practice becomes more complex it is vital that measures of performance are sophisticated enough maintain validity, and have the confidence of GPs; this proposal meets neither of these requirements.’

Pulse revealed today, the former chair of the committee - Dr Colin Hunter, a GP in Westhill, Aberdeenshire - said that NICE had ‘lost the plot’ to consider introducing the new indicators.

He said: ‘I personally am completely against the 10%. I don’t think there is enough evidence to support it and I think it’s a societal question.

‘I think it is where NICE has lost the plot – when you end up with the majority of people over 65 needing a statin because the economics tell you that. The economics are far from a good science.’

Dr Hunter’s intervention followed those of the RCGP and the GPC, who both strongly opposed the proposals in their consultation responses.

The GPC said that it was ‘vital for the credibility of QOF’ that indicators have a robust evidence base, make significant difference to patients and are backed for the profession, adding that these proposals ‘fail on all these counts’.

The RCGP warned that the proposals risked ‘the loss of professional confidence in the healthcare targets they are being asked to meet’.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Despite opposition from GP leaders and other leading clinicians concerned about the potential for over-medicalisation of healthy people and diversion of resources away from the sick onto the 'worried well', this still goes through, but as Graham said " Not unexpected seeing Big Pharma is well represented on the NICE guidelines panel"

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